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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Nov. 26, 2018
She Reported From the World’s Combat Zones, at the Cost of Her Life
By Joshua Hammer
IN EXTREMIS
The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin
By Lindsey Hilsum
Illustrated. 378 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
The death of Marie Colvin under fire in Homs, Syria, in February 2012
was, for many who knew her, both a shock and a tragedy foretold. I had
first met this acclaimed journalist in the Albanian mountain town of
Kukes in April 1999, during the Kosovo war. Alone among the scores of
reporters who had converged on this dreary outpost, Colvin had crossed
the border with a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army and spent several
days in a muddy trench being shelled and shot at by Serb forces. Three
years later, during the Aqsa intifada, I saw her again. After invading
the West Bank town of Jenin, a center of Palestinian militancy, and
fighting from house to house for almost two weeks, the Israeli Defense
Forces pulled back far enough to allow reporters to sneak in and observe
the destruction. With three others, I walked through rubble-filled
alleys and entered one of the few homes that hadn’t been badly damaged.
There sat Colvin — wearing the eye patch she had recently acquired after
being half-blinded by a grenade in Sri Lanka — calmly sipping tea and
smoking a cigarette. She had been reporting from inside the town,
sheltered by a Palestinian family, throughout the battle.
Lindsey Hilsum’s “In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War
Correspondent Marie Colvin” is an extraordinary account of one
reporter’s fearless and ultimately fatal dedication. The international
editor of Channel 4 News in Britain and a longtime combat reporter,
Hilsum was one of many colleagues drawn into Colvin’s orbit. They flew
in a rickety Ukrainian plane from Djibouti to Asmara to cover a 1998 war
between Ethiopia and Eritrea; dined together in Tripoli, Libya; partied
at Colvin’s home in London and conversed on Skype just before Colvin was
killed. Members of a tiny coterie of female war reporters in an
overwhelmingly male-dominated profession, the pair viewed themselves,
Hilsum writes, as “the Thelma and Louise of the press corps.” But while
Hilsum eventually scaled back her risk-taking, Colvin could never leave
the front lines behind. Piecing together Colvin’s exuberantly messy life
through more than a hundred interviews with ex-husbands, former lovers,
family members, friends and colleagues, Hilsum draws an empathetic
portrait of a woman whose courage often crossed into recklessness, both
in combat zones and outside them.
Colvin grew up in Oyster Bay, Long Island, the daughter of
schoolteachers who doted on their five children. Her upbringing was
Roman Catholic, suburban and comfortably middle class. At Yale, she fell
under the tutelage of John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima,” one of many
influential figures who would shape her career. She got her start
livening up a newsletter for the Teamsters in New York, jumped from
there to U.P.I. and was soon dispatched to Paris. Hired away by Rupert
Murdoch’s Sunday Times, she made her name in 1987 with a story about
watching a young woman die after being shot by a sniper during a militia
siege of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. The reporting she did
there — excruciatingly close, filled with intimate glimpses of human
suffering — established a template. “It has always seemed to me that
what I write about is humanity in extremis,” she would say in a 2001
feature article, “pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to
tell people what really happens in wars.”
Hilsum unpacks one terrifying story after another to illustrate how far
Colvin was willing to go to expose the truth. Trapped in Chechnya in
December 1999 during an aerial bombing campaign by the Russian Army, she
and a young Russian photographer were forced to hike for days through
the snowbound Caucasus to the Georgian border. Stopping to rest meant
becoming a target for bombs. “She struggled to breathe, regretting every
cigarette she had smoked,” Hilsum writes in an excruciatingly vivid
account. “Dima sat down, saying he could go no further. Marie knew that
despair was even more dangerous than the cold. ‘Get up! Keep moving!’
she urged.”
Colvin also had a knack for gaining the confidence of dictators and
demagogues. In 1986 she talked her way into the compound of the Libyan
strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi in Tripoli. Hilsum delights in describing
their first meeting: “After a few minutes Qaddafi entered dressed in a
gray padded flight suit, sockless feet peeking from lizard skin slip-on
shoes. ‘I am Qaddafi,’ he announced. ‘No kidding,’ Marie thought.” She
landed an exclusive interview and maintained contact with him for years.
She befriended Yasir Arafat in exile in Tunisia, joined him on his
return from the 1993 Oslo Accords and visited his Ramallah compound when
it was besieged by the Israel Defense Forces in 2002. Colvin liked
Arafat but sparred with him over his failure to suppress Palestinian
violence; she was commissioned to write an Arafat biography, but could
never find the discipline to finish it.
Away from combat zones, Colvin moved easily through London high society
and hosted memorable soirees in her Hammersmith home. “Elegant in a
black cocktail dress, she mixed vodka martinis, the house full of
actors, poets and politicians as well as journalists,” Hilsum writes of
one such gathering. She drank to excess, took many lovers and married
twice. Her relationships with gifted but unreliable men who abused her
trust left her emotionally shattered. Some anecdotes that Hilsum relates
will be familiar to those who have read Marie Brenner’s fine profile of
Colvin in Vanity Fair, now adapted for film and republished in an
anthology of Brenner’s pieces, “A Private War: Marie Colvin and Other
Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels, and Renegades” (Simon & Schuster, paper,
$16). But Hilsum, who had full access to Colvin’s notes and journals, is
able to delve far deeper into her subject’s complicated inner life. “I
was blinded by your looks and the sex and so tried to ignore what my
brain was telling me,” Colvin writes in her diary after discovering her
longtime partner’s multiple affairs. “So I drank more and read less and
my world telescoped down to yours — sex, looks and money.”
Colvin grew increasingly stressed and unhappy in her last decade. Many
colleagues were leaving the battlefield behind, but she saw no other
options. In 2001, she joined Tamil Tiger rebels in northern Sri Lanka
and was hit by a grenade blast during a harrowing nighttime journey back
to government territory. She soothed her nerves with larger quantities
of alcohol, fretted about losing her looks, ruefully accepted that she
would never have children of her own. And she took greater risks. “Use
my skills as a writer to help those who can’t find justice anywhere
else,” she wrote in her diary in 2010. “Acting despite fear — it
matters.” In the winter of 2012, against all advice, she joined Syrian
rebels on a doomed journey into the besieged city of Homs, surrounded by
Assad’s army. Syrian intelligence traced her satellite phone calls
(technically unsophisticated, she ignored warnings about that too) to a
rebel media center and targeted the building with artillery, killing her
and a young French photographer.
Colvin never slowed down long enough to write a memoir. Now, thanks to
Hilsum’s deeply reported and passionately written book, she has the full
accounting that she deserves.
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